A US Department of Energy employee who had access to nuclear secrets lost his state secrets clearance after accidentally uploading 187,000 NSFW images to the department’s server. As it turned out, the man had been collecting this archive for more than 30 years and planned to use it to train his own AI model that creates “robot lovers.” This was reported by the US Department of Energy and 404 Media.
On March 23, 2023, a DOE employee decided to back up his personal files. His “personal archive” contained approximately 187,000 NSFW images that he had collected since the 1990s.
The goal, he said, was to create a neural network to generate “robot NSFW” using his own images as a training set.
“During my depression, I felt isolated and lonely, so I started playing around with image generation tools, creating robot NSFW,” he explained to DOE investigators.
He said he stored the collection on a personal cloud drive and was sure that it would remain separate from the working system during backups. But the technology did not forgive human naivety: the archive was synchronized directly with a government server.
Six months later, DOE cybersecurity experts approached him with a question about why hundreds of thousands of erotic files ended up on the government network. The man admitted his mistake, but said that he “didn’t think it was very wrong,” and even compared the internal investigation to the “Spanish Inquisition.”
What happened next?
A formal investigation began. A DOE psychologist determined that the man had suffered from chronic depression since childhood and was experiencing a severe episode at the time of the incident, which affected his ability to assess the consequences of his actions.
Despite treatment and stabilization of his condition, experts concluded that the risk of a similar episode recurring remained “very high” and denied him the restoration of access to classified data.
It was the publication of the report on this appeal that made the story public — now the “architect of the robot-NSFW-neural network” officially lost access to US nuclear secrets.